Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

This weekend I’m working on making the parsing more robust. The most common friction I’ve heard is that downloading books elsewhere and importing them into the app is distracting. I’m torn between expanding it to include a peer-to-peer book exchange or turning it into an RSS feed reader.

You hit the nail on the head regarding language support.

Mandarin/Multilingual Support: Absolutely, supporting a wide range of languages—especially Mandarin—is a top priority. Since we focus on extracting the official subtitles provided by YouTube, the language support is inherently tied to what the YouTube platform offers. We just need to ensure our system correctly parses and handles those specific Unicode character sets on the backend. We'll make sure CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages are handled cleanly from Day 1.

The RAG/Semantic Search Idea: That is an excellent feature suggestion and exactly where I see the tool evolving! Instead of just giving the user a zip file of raw data, the true value is transforming that data into a searchable corpus. The idea of using RAG to search across an entire playlist/channel transcript is something we're actively exploring as a roadmap feature, turning the tool from a downloader into a Research Assistant.

Thanks for the use case and the specific requirements! It helps us prioritize the architecture.

It's a real life treasure hunt in the Blue Ridge Mountains with a current total prize of $31,200+ in gold coins and a growing side pot.

I modeled it off of last year's Project Skydrop (https://projectskydrop.com) which was in the Boston area.

* Shrinking search area (today, Day 5, it will be 160 miles, on Day 21 it'll be just 1 foot wide)

* 24/7 webcam trained on the jar of gold coins sitting on the forest floor just off a public hiking trail

* Premium upgrades ($10 from each upgrade goes towards the side pot) for aerial photos above the treasure and access to a private online community (and you get your daily clues earlier)

* $2 from each upgrade goes towards the goal of raising $20k for continued Hurricane Helene relief

So far the side pot is $6k and climbing.

It's been such a fun project to work on, but also a lot of work. Tons of moving parts and checking twice and three times to make sure you've scrubbed all the EXIF data, etc.

My current prototype scans potential lookalikes for a target domain and then tracks DNS footprint over time. It's early, but functional - and makes it easier to understand if some lookalike domain is looking more "threat-y".

I've also been working on automating the processing of a parent-survey response for my kid's school using LLMs. The goal is to produce consistent summarization and statistics across multiple years and provide families with a clearer voice and helping staff and leadership at the school best understand what things have been working well (and where the school could improve).